The first emblematic species sequenced by the Hong Kong Biodiversity Genomics Consortium are published to coincide with International DNA Day.

The Annual International Biocuration Conference (AIBC) was held for the first in India, at the Indian Biological Data Centre (IBDC), Regional Centre for Biotechnology (RCB), Faridabad and co-hosted by the Department of Plant Molecular Biology, University of Delhi South Campus. As usual, GigaDB had representation at the event (see write-ups of many previous meetings here), Mary Ann Tuli and Chris Hunter. Both of whom were wearing two hats!

The 9th Women in Science Conference took place in Shenzhen. Below are some highlights from the conference co-organized by our Publishing Director, Laurie Goodman, and Co-Chaired by Doris Yang, from BGI-College.   Today,  March 8, 2024 marks International Women’s Day – where women’s achievement and inclusivity is celebrated.

Few countries have a biodiversity that’s comparable to Brazil’s, including plant-based food sources that are little known elsewhere.  Even in big cities you may pick all kinds of fruit directly from the tree, which can be both tasty and also interesting for the botanist. The Citizen Science project “Pomar Urbano” collects data on urban fruit-bearing plant in Brazilian cities.

Kevin Ashley’s (DCC director) closing remark at the IDCC (International Digital Curation Conference) 2024 meeting was “ Reflect, Enjoy, Do something! ”. Hopefully you will enjoy my doing something.

*A multitude of papers on novel methods for Spatial Omics are published in a cross-journal series launching today in GigaScience and GigaByte Journals. * Spatial Omics is a new field that is taking large-scale data-rich biological and biomedical research into new dimensions. Which is having a significant impact on the fundamental fields of biology and biomedicine.

PAG (Plant and Animal Genomes conference) returned to the Town and Country resort San Diego for its 31st installment this January (Jan 12-17, 2024), bigger and better than ever before! The GigaScience Press team are regular attendees of the meeting (see last years write-up), and this year members of our Editorial and Curation teams joined nearly 3000 delegates from over 60 countries.

Marking the 10 ^th anniversary of the formulation of the FAIR principles, we have one of our GigaBlog Q&A’s with Peter-Bram ’t Hoen, Alain van Gool, Anna Niehues and Casper de Visser from the Netherlands X-omics Initiative and Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, authors of a new paper on publishing FAIR workflows.

In the beginning GigaScience was at the first AsiaEvo conference, which took place in Shenzhen, China in 2019. Back then, the chair of the first AsiaEvo Conference, Guojie Zhang (longtime friend and board member of GigaScience ) said of the history of the AsiaEvo meeting series:

We start the new year with news from the deep, published in GigaScience : The genome of a sea cucumber, collected at a depth of 2400 m during a submarine trip to a hydrothermal vent, helps scientists to understand how marine animals can survive in extreme conditions. Hydrothermal vents are an unlikely environment for animals to flourish.